Business in China

Most advice about doing business in China comes from people who've spent two weeks in Shanghai. Or from people who left five years ago. The country moves too fast for either perspective to be useful.

I've been based in Beijing since 2016. I work daily with Chinese and German teams inside some of the largest automotive companies in the world — Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan. What I've learned isn't reducible to a list of cultural dos and don'ts.

Working in China vs. working with China

There's a meaningful difference between managing a China operation from headquarters and actually operating inside the Chinese business environment. The first is a strategy exercise. The second is a daily negotiation with a system that has its own logic, its own speed, and its own definition of what “good enough” means.

German-Chinese dynamics

The German-Chinese business relationship is one of the most productive and most misunderstood in global commerce. Both cultures value engineering, precision, and long-term thinking — but they define each of those words differently. I spend a lot of my time translating between these worldviews, not the languages.

The ten-year perspective

Short-term assignments produce short-term understanding. Living here for nearly a decade has given me something different: the ability to see patterns across cycles, to distinguish what's actually changing from what's just noisy, and to advise with context that can't be acquired from a distance.